In harvesting machines such as combines that have a harvester head, it is well known to provide an outer crop divider that extends forward from the harvester head in the forward direction of travel of the harvesting machine, and which serves primarily to separate a particular section of crops to be cut from the remainder of the crops. These crop dividers have been designed with the secondary object of raising those crops near the divider (in cases where the crops tend to hang over or lie on the ground) so that those crops do not become entangled in the harvesting machine as it passes. Crop dividers have also been designed so that they do not present sharp corners or edges to the standing crops, which might break the stalks and cause the crops to hang over. To meet the above requirements, crop dividers of a semi-conical form have been used, which present a smooth and tapering surface to the crop. The functioning of harvesting machinery using a crop divider was described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,051,503 B2 to Dirk Weichholdt entitled Crop Divider, at FIG. 1 and in Column 2, line 58 through Column 3, line 32, which patent is incorporated herein by reference as if set forth herein in its entirety.
Crop dividers have had the disadvantage that they have often been relatively fixed in position with respect to the harvester head, so that their adjustment was of a limited nature only. Thus, an important disadvantage of typical crop dividers is that when it is required to transport the harvesting machine, the crop divider cannot be folded and had to be detached. Detaching, separately transporting, and re-attaching crop dividers to harvester heads is cumbersome due to their bulky size, and difficult in part because the attachment mechanism is often spring-loaded. Accordingly, in practice harvester heads are often transported on public roads with the crop dividers in place and sticking out beyond the width of the traffic lane, notwithstanding the safety risks. This is the case with the vast majority of old and modern harvesting equipment, even though several other patented systems have long attempted to address this issue.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 703,497 to John F. Steward, issued Jul. 1, 1902 and entitled Grain-Divider For Harvesters, attempted to address this issue by providing a mechanism whereby the crop divider could be tilted upward and retracted backwards. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 1,859,208 to Kane Paul and assigned to the International Harvester Company, issued May 17, 1932 and entitled Harvester, as well as U.S. Pat. No. 2,209,047 to Edmund M. Asbridge et al. and assigned to the International Harvester Company, issued Jul. 23, 1940 and entitled Harvester, likewise attempted to solve this problem by providing crop dividers that could be tilted upward and retracted backwards. U.S. Pat. No. 4,087,954 to Arthur Reese Sr., issued May 9, 1978 and entitled Retractable Crop Gathering Finger Construction, attempted to solve the issue by providing a complex telescoping-retractable crop divider. All of the patents identified above are incorporated herein by reference as if set forth herein in their entirety. But unfortunately, none of these mechanisms have been widely adopted in the industry, likely because of their complexity, expense, lack of robustness, and their unsuitability for working with the bulkier geometries of modern crop dividers.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,715,273 B2 to Dirk Weichholdt and assigned to Deere & Company, issued Apr. 6, 2004 and entitled Stalk Divider, took another approach to solving the problem, namely providing a locking pivoting joint (shown in FIGS. 2-4) as part of a curved, round-cross-section tube that connected the crop divider to the harvester head (as shown in FIG. 1). That patent is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. While rather complex, the mechanism described in this patent was meant to allow the crop divider to be folded to the side to allow the harvester head to be transported without the necessity of removing the crop divider from the harvester head. Later on in U.S. Pat. No. 7,051,503 B2, issued to the same inventor on May 30, 2006 and entitled Crop Divider, Mr. Weichholdt proposed a simpler structure to use in connection with the same curved, round-cross-section tube. Both of these patents admitted in their specifications that pivoting crop head dividers were already patented in at least three prior patents, namely DE 1 926 441 A, DD 128 878 A, and DE 101 46 768 A, but each unique design was granted a separate patent specific to that design.
While U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,715,273 and 7,051,503 provide potential solutions for future products (the present inventors are not aware of these designs having ever been available on the market), this does not help the many thousands of owners of existing harvester heads where the crop dividers are fixedly connected to the harvester head by a frame comprising straight sections of square tubing, especially where there are one or more additional support members connecting the crop divider to the harvester head. These existing harvester heads could not feasibly be retrofitted with the designs shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,715,273 and 7,051,503, or any of the other designs that have been reviewed. In practice none of these designs have been widely adopted, if at all, and the vast majority of existing combine harvester heads still have fixed crop dividers that do not pivot. Accordingly, what is needed is a simple, inexpensive, truly feasible technical solution that readily permits do-it-yourself retrofitting of existing combine harvester heads to allow their crop dividers to easily pivot.